In 1972, Congress added a new “citizen suit” provision to the Clean Water Act (CWA), allowing private individuals and groups to leverage the government’s prosecutorial power against American businesses and cities. The Constitution reserves that power for the executive branch—and does not allow it to be delegated to unelected private actors with no oversight or accountability to voters.
This is more than a violation of abstract constitutional principles. After they were improperly given the executive branch’s power to enforce the law and prosecute alleged violations, these private groups turned environmental law into a revenue-generating scheme for their own advantage.
They subject small businesses and communities to costly litigation over alleged permit violations that neither the federal government nor state agencies chose to pursue. In California, for example, two partnering environmental nonprofits filed 96 near-identical lawsuits in just one court, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.
These nuisance suits force their targets to spend their time and money on needless litigation, rather than investing in infrastructure updates, making productive use of natural resources, pursuing environmental innovation, or otherwise bettering residents’ lives. Many choose to settle, rather than waste years in court—and the groups filing these citizen suits expect it. They are chasing punitive settlement fees, rather than fighting for the environment or the public good, without having to answer to voters for misusing the law.
This abuse has gone largely unchecked for over 50 years. Now, however, communities and businesses targeted by citizen suits are partnering with Pacific Legal Foundation to stop it.
The Town of Alexandria, Tennessee, is fighting back against a citizen suit filed by the Alabama-based nonprofit Tennessee Riverkeeper. The nonprofit sued in May 2026 over alleged violations of a discharge permit. Both the Environmental Protection Agency and Tennessee’s Department of Environment & Conservation declined to bring suit.
Riverkeeper has sued over 30 small cities and businesses in Tennessee for alleged violations of the CWA. PLF recently represented two of these cities, Luttrell and Springfield, in challenges to the citizen suit provision. Riverkeeper dropped both suits shortly after PLF joined.
Represented at no cost by Pacific Legal Foundation, the Town of Alexandria asks the court to dismiss the citizen suit filed against it and find the CWA’s citizen suit provision unconstitutional.
Alexandria argues that the CWA’s citizen suit provision should be struck down because it violates the Constitution’s private nondelegation doctrine and separation of powers by allowing private plaintiffs to wield the executive branch’s prosecutorial powers. The Town also argues that citizen suits threaten Americans’ rights by allowing private actors, who cannot be held accountable by the voting public, to exercise government authority.
What’s At Stake?
- Environmental law should prioritize abundance and human flourishing—not take a punitive approach that turns conservation into a bludgeon for private actors to wield against American towns and businesses.
- Non-government entities do not have the authority to govern.
- The “citizen suit” provision of the Clean Water Act unconstitutionally gives the executive branch’s power to oversee the enforcement of federal law to unelected, unaccountable private individuals and groups.
